Elizabeth Bear: Book of Iron

The roadster was equipped with headlamps. As the light faded from the sky, Prince Salih switched them on. Bijou regretted their dazzle: her eyes adapted to the brightness, so she could not see across the starlit fields. In the mountains of her birth and in the veldt they presided over like so many seated queens, stars were a rare sight, and total darkness rarer still. The single sun of Messaline, and the darkness of its nights, were precious to her.

Soon enough, they left behind the plantings for grazing land. Goats dozed on the rocky ground beside round-roofed cottages. The roadster’s passengers engaged in idle conversation, Prince Salih explaining to Salamander and Maledysaunte what it was that they passed—which village grew olives, and which mined salt—and the names of the mountains in the distance. Riordan was curiously silent, a trait Bijou did not associate with entertainers. Kaulas pulled his veil down to smoke another cigarette.

The road turned away from the river and began to ascend, narrowing into a pass between high stony hills that were mountains only by courtesy. The suspension rattled over ruts and rocks. At the top of the rise, the prince let the automobile roll to a halt on the shoulder. He killed the headlights, and for a moment they sat silently in the desert chill.

It was full dark now, that scraped curl of moon long set, but the stars burned bright and close. It did not take Bijou’s eyes long to adjust, and by the mutters from the front seat, Maledysaunte’s adapted even faster. Necromancers could see in the dark.

Before them, a sea of sand stretched into the distance, heaves and swells robbed of color by the starlight. By day those slopes were red and tawny and streaked black with mica-dust along their lee surfaces. Now they might have been cast in beaten, tarnishing silver: the eternally breaking sand-waves of the seemingly endless erg. Bijou knew it didn’t stretch forever—she’d crossed it once, as a girl who’d seen fewer than twenty harvests—but in the starlight it might as well have.

Riordan shifted on the seat beside her, his knee brushing Bijou’s as he leaned forward between the seats. His flesh felt chill through the fabric of his trousers. She placed a hand on his shoulder to be sure, and felt his cool resilience. Of course , she thought. If you were an immortal necromancer, you would want at least one companion who remembered all the years you remembered, as well.

He smiled at her, the dead shoulder under her hand rising and falling apologetically.

She smiled back. Just because a man was dead was no reason to be rude.

Ambrosias, curled in a heap at her feet, rattled sleepily. “Right,” Bijou said. She jumped up on the seat, sat on the door-edge, and swung her feet over. “No automobile beyond this point.”

Heat still rose from the sun-baked earth, warming Bijou’s feet in her boots even as the dry cold of the air raised goose flesh along her neck and shoulders. She turned to collect Ambrosias: it reared up atop the door and made a bridge to reach her. On the other side of the roadster, Kaulas was opening his door and stepping out with dignity. Riordan followed Bijou, even more nimble. He simply placed a hand on the door and vaulted over, swinging his legs high. Limp he might, but being dead obviously had not affected his agility.

“Shank’s mare?” he asked without pleasure, surveying the slope down to the dunes. The breeze off the desert streaked hair across his face. He wiped it back with his left hand and seemed to test his stride against the sand.

Bijou shook her head, beads clicking in her hair. “We’ve come this way before.” While Kaulas offered Salamander a hand out of the car, she set Ambrosias down beside the road and stretched up tall—or as tall as she could stretch—letting her rings sparkle in the starlight.

Then, with a glance at the prince—who paused in winching up the roadster’s ragtop to nod—she lowered her arms and clapped her hands, glass bangles jangling like wind-chimes.

Maledysaunte shut the car door with a thud as Salamander stood clear. There was a pause, a long silence as the wind died away. Then Bijou heard the clop of hooves echoing along the pass, and a scrape like a stick across a grooved gourd. A few moments longer, and the starlight shone through the rib cages and illuminated the hide-hung skeletons of three horses, an ass, and a camel that made their way out of the rocks at roadside to stand before Bijou. They were all so old and weathered they smelled mostly of dusty leather and sun-drenched stone. One of the horses limped on a broken foreleg: that was the source of the rasping sound.

“You’re a necromancer too,” Maledysaunte said. “That makes three.”

“I’m an artificer,” Bijou said. “I don’t bring the dead back to life, raise shades, or animate corpses. But bones have movement in them, or the memory of movement, and they are happy to move again.”

Maledysaunte’s gaze darted to the side as if something had drawn it. But just as Bijou was about to cry out a warning, Maledysaunte shook her head and pulled her gaze back to Bijou’s face. Bijou, so appraised, felt an unaccustomed chill work through her on spiky spider-feet.

To dispel it, she gestured to Ambrosias. “I can work spells into an armature, and give personality and judgment. Autonomy of a sort. But those—”

Maledysaunte seemed to follow the gesture. “They move by your will. Not undead, just animated.”

“More or less,” Bijou said. “They’ll carry us into Erem, anyway.”

“Can’t we walk?” asked Salamander, frowning dubiously at the camel.

“Only the dead,” Kaulas said portentously, “may walk into dead Erem.” He spoiled it with a laugh—a chuckle, really—at Salamander’s stricken expression. “The camel is most comfortable.”

The camel was most comfortable because the fat of its humps had saponified, so its riders need not rest their seats on its bare spine. But while Maledysaunte would probably find that intriguing, Salamander’s night-shadowed expression indicated that she’d probably rather not know too many of the fascinating details about their mounts.

Prince Salih settled his rifle over one shoulder and circled the outside of the group, scanning the darkness beyond with a hunter’s eye.

Riordan looked from one raddled corpse to the others. “I’ll walk,” he said. “It won’t be a problem for me.”

Kaulas made no comment—no reaction, in fact, at all. Prince Salih looked as if he might say something, but whatever he caught in the faces of those around him convinced him to school his tongue. “Well then,” he said. “That simplifies matters.”

The dead mounts knelt in the road. Bijou moved forward, throwing a leg over the ass, and pulled it upright with the power of her will. Although she was not tall, her feet nearly scraped the ground on either side. Desert-dry hide flaked crumbs away where her weight rubbed it against bone.

Maledysaunte reached out absently, as if brushing spiderwebs or an irritating insect away from her face, but there was nothing there. Kaulas helped Salamander on to the camel before climbing up behind her, steadying her with his hands at her waist.

Well , thought Bijou. Anger, jealousy, even irritation—they all seemed like too much work. She settled her sun hat on her head. It was easier than carrying it.

“Come on,” she encouraged. “It’s not far now.”

Prince Salih would have taken the broken-legged horse, out of chivalry or braggadocio, but Riordan’s decision to trust his own twisted foot left the prince and Maledysaunte to the other two dead horses—mares, geldings, or stallions, it was beyond knowing now. When everybody except the bard was mounted—Bijou couldn’t have said settled , not with the dubious look Salamander still wore—she turned to the prince. “Beyzade?”